I’m basically writing this post to say: Suck it, DFW. I did not enjoy reading Infinite Jest. Nothing came together like I thought it should have , or was expecting. Maybe that was Wallace’s point. But I can’t appreciate that. I read for a story, to get lost in someone else’s life, to find a new world. I don’t read to be bombarded by an author’s commentary on an addicted society’s breakdown of communication.

And the ending! I hate hate HATE books that don’t end. This one didn’t bring around any kind of resolution at all. In fact, it probably left more open-ended story lines and unanswered questions than the series finale of LOST. (Don’t get me started on that.)

Is Joelle (P.G.O.A.T) really disfigured, or is she pained by her beauty?
What made the Entertainment so damn addicting?
How did JOI make the film?
Did they find the Master Copy?
Did Don Gately live?
What else happened in the flashback?
And if he lived, did Don and Joelle ever get together?
Where did Pemulis go?
Did he get expelled?
Did the O.N.A.N.T.A. Drug Tester ever come back for Hal?
Did he injure himself before he could be tested?

Let me say this, I love Hal Incandenza. All the Incandenza children, really. Had they been in a different story, I’d have loved every minute of it. They are truly real characters. But then, had they been in another story, it wouldn’t have been a DFW story and so they wouldn’t be the Incandenzas.

I also love Michael Pemulis.

The fact is, yes, IJ changed me. It was like climbing a mountain I never really wanted to climb but I felt obligated because I’d committed to doing it. And when I got to the top? The view wasn’t spectacular. It was the same view I’d been piecing together for months, but now I got much more of the picture. I still couldn’t see around to the other side of the mountain though. And so I’m always going to be left wondering what the complete view really looked like.

5 responses to “Infinite Jest: The End”

congrats on finishing that insanely long book, haha. i saw how many pages it was and just shuddered, and that’s from someone who loves reading. no thank you. but yeah even if you weren’t happy at the end, at least you did it.

I feel pretty much exactly the same way. When I got to the point where there were only five or so pages left for me to read, I got pretty pissed off because I realized it wasn’t going to end like it should. And the whole wraith thing pissed me off to no end. It just seemed sort of ridiculous, although I guess the whole book was pretty ridic.

I did end up turning to the google to understand the end of the book and found this site: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/ijend – it helped me to understand some of the stuff I was confused about, but mostly it just made me hate that book even more.

That website did help a little. I didn’t get any of that from reading the end myself. I think I was just so pissed off and over it that I stopped putting every ounce of my mind power into analyzing every single word.